Article: Wall Street, Then and Now: Extreme Consumption, Scandal.(FinancialObserver)

Byline: Daniel Gross

After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party that Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905, by Patricia Beard. HarperCollins, 402 pages, $25.95.

Patricia Beard kicks off her book with a string of superlatives. James Hazen Hyde, the son of Equitable Life Assurance Society founder Henry, was "the handsomest man in any room, the most dramatically dressed, and, at nearly six foot four, usually the tallest." The lavish ball he threw in Manhattan in January 1905 helped touch off a "business brawl that entangled the most famous railroad entrepreneurs, industrialists, and financiers of the era." But these ...

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